Category: Key Lever

While high-quality primary care is the foundation of an effective health system, simply setting an ambitious primary care spending target does not guarantee better care, access, or equity. In recent years, more states have announced plans to increase or even “double” primary care spending as a share of total health expenditures.  Yet only a small…

Despite broad agreement that the United States has insufficient primary care capacity, the health policy literature has devoted far more attention to how primary care should be paid for than to how states can develop and finance the additional capacity a high-functioning system requires. The shortage is evident at the most basic level: too many…

The purpose of Key Lever 5 is to design a statewide network of high-functioning primary care organizations (PCOs) that meet the needs of the state population (see Key Lever 2), provide them with a complete spectrum of care and governance principles that protect them from potentially conflicting objectives of the organizations that provide the necessary…

Over the last several years, headlines have touted that multiple states are doubling their primary care spending as a percentage of total health expenditures. But only five states[1] have formal, enforceable primary care spending targets. And five additional states participating in CMS’s AHEAD program have committed to increasing primary care spending as a share of…

Introduction Over the past several years, a growing number of states have adopted or are actively considering primary care spending targets. These targets are typically associated with familiar aspirations: better access to care, better health outcomes, better management of chronic disease, lower avoidable emergency department utilization, lower avoidable hospital utilization, greater health equity, and better…

fter completing Rethinking Primary Care Investment Strategy, it became clear that state-level executives could benefit from a framework to help them organize “a multi-year planning, development, and implementation effort involving numerous public and private sector stakeholders, including payers, providers, employers and NGOs,” as described in Lever 1: Authorizations, Goals and Objectives. The result is nine…

Key Points This is the second in a series of articles on the nine Key Levers of primary care investment. The first was Maximizing Primary Care Investment Value: A Framework for State Leaders. Introduction Most states and healthcare professionals nationwide already recognize that we face a significant and growing shortage of primary care professionals: physicians,…